


We Build The Wall To Keep Us Free

by ElphieRix



Category: Girl Genius, Girl Genius (Webcomic), Hadestown
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Hadestown AU, M/M, Multi, OT3 Goodness, also there's magic, but not too much Angst, but not too much fluff, but there’s a happy ending! probably, i guess it’s kinda Gil whump as well because i do not let that boy catch a break, in addition to normal Girl Genius technology is magic, music is magic, shit i lied there's a lot of angst, the very definition of "the au no-one asked for"
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 15:44:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6760018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElphieRix/pseuds/ElphieRix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Other is defeated, Europa is decimated, and Baron Orpheus dominates the Wastelands. With Castle Orpheus above, and the Wastelands unsurvivable, the only way is down, way down Mechanicsburgtown...</p><p>This is GeniusTown, the Hadestown AU Girl Genius deserves. I live at elphierix.tumblr.com and this fanfic lives at geniustown.tumblr.com if you have any questions about this incredibly niche project. So come along Songbirds, come way down GeniusTown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Times Being What They Are

Dear Father,  
Research is going as expected. Little progress has been made, and I know it’s what you wanted, but I still can’t see the harm if we do succeed. This is really taking a toll on Tarvek and I think ~~we~~ you might have been wrong about him. Yesterday we were scavenging and nearly got into an altercation with ~~these arseh~~ another group and he talked us out of it when I probably would have just hit them until they went away. He’s a lot smarter than you originally thought and I think if we just spoke to him he might

Gil put down his pen. That approach wasn’t going to work.

Dear Father,  
Tarvek Eurydice is the biggest idiot I have ever had the misfortune of working with. He is far too stupid to ever conceivably be any sort of

Gil stared at the paper. The Baron would never believe that. He sighed.

Dear Baron Orpheus,  
Research goes as expected. Eurydice is trying his best but little progress has been made and he is too afraid of failure to take any serious risks. I am in good health but find myself a little bored by the work and the company, but I understand that you would not ask this of me if it were not important. I hope all is well with the Empire and with you.  
Your son,  
Gilgamesh

That would have to do. 

Gil stared blankly at his bedroom wall. Once upon a time it had been painted orange, and some of the colour still clung to the corners and rivets in the dull grey metal. In places it was hard to tell what was leftover paint and what was rust. He didn’t know what the underground bunker had been built for, with its sophisticated laboratories and simple living quarters. He didn’t know who had originally picked the horrible brassy paint, someone who clearly cared so much more about how they worked than how they lived. He didn’t even know how Tarvek had found the place. Or why it seemed to be safe from the numerous Abominations wandering the Wastelands. Or how Tarvek had got out here without dying. Or-

“Hey, Zoing?” he called, and the construct stuck his head out from under the bed. He chuntered happily as he ripped up the discarded letters. “They stay shredded this time, alright? We’ll find you a proper jigsaw if you’re bored.”

“Meka teeee?” said Zoing hopefully.

“Not today, but you could go and catch some spiders for us?” said Gil. “Alive though!” he added as Zoing hurried away.

The room was windowless and cramped, with no furniture other than his bed and a steadily disintegrating chest of drawers; but the door opened straight onto the main lab. The main lab! Along two of the walls hung a vast array of tools, all the tools Gil could think of and more, some looking more like randomly twisted bits of metal than anything actually useful, and others oddly hooked and pointed with a nastier air than any inanimate object had any business having. Another wall was heaped with discarded machines and broken clanks, limbs and gears and wheels tangled together in something akin to a bird’s nest, or a patch of brambles. The last wall was a row of doorways. Doorways to a rabbit’s warren of bedrooms and storage cupboards, a kitchen and more labs and bathrooms and libraries and rooms Gil had yet to explore. If he were honest, and Gil often tried to be, it wasn’t much compared to Castle Orpheus. But even shared with Tarvek, it was more his than anything else had ever been. It had been months, probably more than a year at this point, but Gil still felt a buzz of excitement when stepping into the main laboratory.

At the centre of the room were several long workbenches, and at a one of them, in front of a large terrarium containing a luxurious mess of leaves and branches and a single common garden spider, was a young man asleep on top of his notes. Gil grinned when he saw him, and stepped lightly to stand behind his friend. Looking at the spider he put a finger to his lips and winked.

“YOU ARE THE PRETTIEST FROG IN THIS ENTIRE POND!” he yelled.

Tarvek hit his head on the desk as he jerked awake. His little round glasses slid off his nose as he spun around to face Gil. 

“Are you ever going to let that go?” he said. “I had a fever.”

“And who selflessly nursed you back to health?” said Gil.

“Zoing,” replied Tarvek, his voice flat as he bent down to pick up his glasses.

“Right… And when was the last time you actually went to sleep in a bed?” Gil said as he dug a tiny flying mail clank from the mess of his workbench.

Tarvek didn’t say anything and looked down at his notes, which were hard to read at the best of times and had certainly not benefited from being slept on. There was definitely some drool on the bit about artificially recreating reverse harmonics… He gave a soft snort of indignation and busied himself trying to further organise his already tidy workspace. After a while, he risked a glance at Gil, who was very pointedly not saying anything as he fiddled with upgrading some of the gears in his mail clank.

“Look,” Tarvek began, but then he stopped and pointed to a door. Gil dumped his clank on the table and followed him through. “We’re not getting anywhere. I don’t know how much time we have left and I’m worried about her. I think she's... losing herself...”

Gil was still trying to decide if Tarvek had meant to lead them into a cupboard when he realised his friend had stopped speaking and was glaring at him from alarmingly close proximity. “We haven’t tried everything, we still have options,” he said.

“No.”

“I’m actually quite good if you’d let me-“

“NO,” said Tarvek again, “It’s too risky. And illegal. Your Father was the one who banned it!”

“My Father was the one who taught me it!”

“Magic’s the reason she’s in this mess.”

“So magic can get her out of it!”

“I said no Gil.” Tarvek’s voice was level and calm, and completely infuriating.

There wasn’t much room in the cupboard anyway, and somewhere in the heat of the quarrel they’d got so close their noses were almost touching. For a second Gil was distracted by the sound of their breathing, harsh and somehow in sync. Then something clicked into place.

“This isn’t about magic. It’s about me. You don’t trust me,” he said. 

It would have been nice, then, if Tarvek had denied it, but instead he was horribly, heavily silent. 

“You think, what, as soon as you agree my Father’s going to swoop down from the sky? Something like that?”

“You’re sending him a letter _right now_ Gil. What am I supposed to think?” Tarvek never quite reached apologetic, but this was the closest Gil had ever heard him sound.

“A letter in which I am LYING!”

Again there was one of those soft, still moments as they stared at each other, neither one willing to look away. The argument hung in the air, all stretched out like an elastic band, taut amongst breath catching in throats and confusion and something else they weren’t quite ready to recognise. A protest of unoiled hinges scraped across the tension, which finally snapped as Zoing opened the door and proudly held up a jam-jar.

“Snrk,” he said, pushing the jar, which was crammed with spindly little brown bodies, into Gil’s hands.

“Oh,” said Gil, “Thanks.”

Gil marched out of the cupboard resolutely avoiding eye contact with Tarvek. Tarvek marched out of the cupboard resolutely avoiding eye contact with Gil. Zoing marched into the cupboard to avoid whatever was going on with them this time.

It was a very quiet day in the lab. Normally they would share ideas and light-heartedly criticise whatever the other was working on; commiserate and celebrate their failures and successes. More often than not they’d be working together (a regularly disastrous occurrence which was always more likely than an argument to convince Zoing to hide). Gil finished tinkering with the mail clank deliberately quickly, accidentally tearing off one of his fingernails in the process and covering his forearms in engine grease. He took longer than he should sending it off, watching until it disappeared into the clouds, which were low and plump with pathetic fallacy. They had a subtle greenish tint where the sun shone through, and that probably meant they were due for acid rain. Gil glared at them.

When he got back to the lab Tarvek was gone and one of his telecommunications rigs was on fire. The magnesium lamp had somehow malfunctioned when a new message came in. If he had been somewhere with natural light, the shadows would have lengthened into darkness as he worked on repairing it. Tightening screws and replacing wires, completely reconfiguring the power source to act as its own fuse, restraining himself from adding a device to stimulate hair regrowth and core apples as the overhead the lights blazed fluorescent and severe, creating a dull ache behind Gil’s eyes. Finally the machine jerked into motion and scratched out the message with the stub of a pencil:

+++abomination__request aid @ 10121815N/27111852W+++

Gil recognised the co-ordinates. The town was one of the last remaining static settlements in all of Europa, and it lurched from tragedy to catastrophe to disaster without ever really stopping to consider if it was worth it. Gil paused. His flying machine had improvements he wanted to test and he really needed to see his lightning ray in action to iron out the kinks, and maybe Tarvek would let him- and the people of Zumzum actually wanted his help. He could be there before dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well this first chapter is up considerably earlier that I expected! Tbh this is mainly a lot of me working on characterisation stuff, trying to work out who Gil and Tarvek are with their different backstories for this fic.
> 
> Stuff that didn't substantially make it into the chapter and probably won't end up actually in the fic: my extended headcanons on the different ways Gil & Tarvek take notes, what Tarvek's bedroom looks like (ask me about it at genuistown.tumblr.com).
> 
> Highlight from my notes for this chapter: Gil is horrible at lying and horrible at being honest.
> 
> Next time: We head to Zumzum, and maybe get a bit of an explanation of how magic fits into this world...


	2. The River Rose Up

Zumzum was empty. A not an animal for miles, a footsteps audibly echoing off cobblestones, a deafening rush of a distant river, kind of empty. Gil’s hands trembled with adrenaline as he made his way into the centre of town. In the quiet even a susurrus of wind between the chimney-stacks seemed loud, and the coil of guilt curdling in his gut pulled ever stronger.

_Too late, too late_ , it whispered.

Gil tightened his grip on his lightning ray. He was beginning to feel a little less confident in bringing an untested weapon up against a monster he knew literally nothing about. Abominations were tricky: people used the term to mean practically anything scary. Zumzum had been terrorised plenty of times, mainly by rogue experiments, but never by a true Abomination. True Abominations were twisted creatures created in the intersection between technology and magic, the same line upon which those with the Spark danced so precariously, and in the trauma of their birth they were often rendered completely mindless and animalistic. Gil had not seen a true Abomination outside of his father’s labs, but he remembered their metallic, atonal stench, the same sharp scent he could taste in the air of Zumzum.

It hadn’t yet rained, and the clouds hung low, pregnant and oppressive over the town. Gil stepped in a puddle. The water splashed up his leg and soaked through the bottom of his trousers. It hadn’t yet rained.

Gil turned into an alleyway, and the river rose up to meet him. He was tall and strong, but his stocky frame was easily pulled under the surface. The river didn’t seem to care that it should have been at least a mile to the south. Water swept him head over heels and he twisted and floundered with the current like a feather on the air. His head and ribs split with pain as he was thrown against the side of a building. Thoughts fogged with oxygen deprivation and the stabbing ache from his temple, he struggled to remember which direction was left and up and down and right or north south east west northsoutheastwestnor-

Gasping and coughing, his world was suddenly filled with oxygen. Still under water, Gil pulled up his shirt to reveal a pair of gills raked down his sides. He hated his Father’s “enhancements” almost as much as he hated how often they were useful. His eyes stung as he looked around, the churning waters were definitely calming, and rising, and… solidifying? Sort of solidifying, into something like jelly; Gil could still push his way through it, could still breathe, but the twigs and debris caught up in the river hung as if frozen.

  
There were people too! They were trapped motionless in the waters, and Gil surged towards them with a movement somewhere between a swim and run. As he reached them he noticed a pins-and-needles sensation across his skin, and the edges of his shirt seemed to be fraying. So the water probably wasn’t just water then. Gil went to grab the nearest person’s arm, a little girl with her dark hair in pigtails and a face contorted by terror. His hand passed right through her, with only the memory of skin and bones and blood, and as it did her whole body dissolved into the river.

__TOO LATE! TOO LATE!__ screamed the guilt at the back of Gil’s mind.

Gil took a quick moment to panic. He’d lost his lightning ray and the knives in his belt wouldn’t do much good against a creature apparently made out of water. But a Spark in a fix usually had a few tricks up their sleeve and, thanks to the Baron, Gil had more than most. He whistled a few useless semiquavers and wished he wasn’t so out of practice as they fizzled and winked out of existence. Sighing under water is never a commendable activity, a lesson Gil quickly learnt as he hacked and spluttered and his mind frantically groped for an escape plan. He needed to be sensible about this. First: get out of what was probably the Abomination’s stomach, and then he could make the thing sorry it had ever tried to eat the future Baron Orpheus. He picked a direction and hoped he could find an exit before whatever was in the water did any more damage to his already smarting eyes.  
Gil found the creature’s side with his face, smashing straight into it nose first. It wouldn’t be the first time his nose had been broken, or the last, but the wound on his temple reopened in protest. Wiping the blood from his eyes, Gil pressed his palms against the Abomination’s skin. There is a moment before surface tension breaks where a man would believe he could walk on water, and the touch of this monster’s skin was that moment, stretched out and supple and stronger than faith. Gil was going to have to pack quite a punch.

A few deep breaths later (through his gills, his Father had given him gills), Gil could feel his song deep in his bones. It thrummed through his organs, rattled his teeth, he couldn’t tell if the echoing bass line was in time with his heart or if his heart kept time with it and it roared so loud in his head it hurt. Blood trickled from his nose and ears as he hummed harmonies of strength and wove them together with his rage and guilt and the power vibrated in his vocal chords and it was too much he didn’t need this much and when he opened his mouth it was more screaming than singing.

For a second there was only everything Gil was pushing against everything the creature was. He could feel water in his veins and hear the eddies and currents of its thoughts: vengeful and malevolent and desperate and so very scared. Then Gil ruptured through its skin like blood from a burst artery. There was an unpleasant crunching sound as he met the cobblestones shoulder first. Winded and lying in the street, Gil got his first proper look at the monster that had almost succeeded in digesting him.  
It was almost fifty percent neck, and stood three times as tall as the surrounding houses. Slightly translucent, looking through it was like peering through old brown glass. Growing up, before he had broken out, Gil had had an obsession with dinosaurs. His favourite had been the triceratops, but the Abomination was clearly a sauropod. Mamenchisaurus or diplodocus or apatosaurus… By this point Gil knew he was concussed. His vision was swimming slightly and his stomach was roiling with nausea and he could not stop thinking about dinosaurs. Maybe it was more of an omeisaurus…

The creature swung its tiny head down to stare at Gil with eyes like spotlights. As he struggled to sit up against the complaints of his broken ribs, dislocated shoulder and still bleeding forehead, it gave an altogether too intelligent grin. Its teeth were like icicles.

Gil dragged himself to his feet. Even standing, the Abomination towered above him. He shivered under its gaze, and kept shivering. There was cold to the core of him. His muscles ached with it. His joints were locked in ice; his thoughts slow and trapped under a layer of thick snow. He tried to root his feet to the floor, to reach into the earth and pull strength and sustenance from the dirt like a tree, but still he felt himself faltering, swaying, falling.  
He heard his head hit the ground, but he didn’t feel it.

The clouds lay above him like a blanket. He could hear the rain churning in their bellies, an urgent queasy jig barely held back by the soft, warm hum of the clouds themselves. Fire with fire, water with water, he thought, and called down the rain. It burned slightly as it hit his skin, but that was nothing to the shriek the creature gave. The sound crashed over him like a waterfall, and in it Gil saw the birth of the Abomination, he felt the terror as a little girl with dark pigtails slipped into the river, heard the peal of magic as a life was washed away and ran over the riverbed and swirled around rocks and rushed and rushed and rushed towards the sea-

Gil wrenched himself away. Any longer in there and his mind risked dissolving with the creature.

He knew he was going to lose consciousness soon, but dimly he registered the sound of people shouting, some in terror, some in celebration. _ __Not too late then___ , he thought smugly.

_____This time_____ , said his guilt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hooooooooooooo boooooooooooy has it been a while. Amazingly, this hasn't been abandoned. Basically, midway through writing this chapter, my life IMPLODED. It was not fun, a lot of horrible stuff happened, I'm a lot better now!
> 
> Stuff I did way too much research into considering they barely appeared in the chapter: d i n o s a u r s.
> 
> Highlight from my notes for the chapter: Zumzum h i r e s a s a m u r a i


	3. Those Who Go, They Don't Come Back

It should have been obvious. It wasn’t as if Gil disappearing off to be _heroic_ was at all unusual. It wasn’t even unusual for Gil to forget to tell Tarvek he was going, and it had never once hurt Tarvek’s feelings before. In fact, Tarvek’s feelings had never once been hurt by Gilgamesh Orpheus. Still, it should have been obvious.

 

Awaking to Zoing waving a mug of steaming oolong under his nose was surprising, but not unprecedented. At first he thought it was Gil making amends in typically backhanded fashion, as both Gil and Zoing were baffled and almost offended by Tarvek’s deep dislike of tea. Then he took a sip. Swallowing gamely, he stared down at the construct.

 

“What the fuck, Zoing?”

 

Zoing squealed victoriously and scuttled out of the room, leaving Tarvek grimly contemplating his mug of salty oolong. He was still contemplating fifteen minutes later as he wandered into the main lab, fully dressed but with red hair still mussed from sleep. He contemplated all the way to his workbench, and stared blankly at his notes from the night before. Despite his extended contemplation, they made very little sense.

 

Sighing, he gathered them up neatly and ventured over to Gil’s workbench. Under the mail clank, the disassembled parts of a self-playing violin, a broken resonance replicator and assorted items of unknown use or provenance, he finally found what he was looking for.

 

“GIL, WE’RE USING THE TYPEWRITER, IT BETTER NOT DO THAT THING AGAIN,” he yelled in the general direction of Gil’s bedroom.

 

That was the point when it was _really_ obvious, but Tarvek just rolled his eyes at the lack of response and turned to the spider tank.

 

“Hey ‘evka, how’re you doing?” he said, nestling a palm-sized typewriter into the dirt of the terrarium.

 

For several horrible minutes the spider that was his sister seemed entirely focused on web-weaving. When she finally stopped she took several more heart-stopping seconds to simply stare at him with eight unblinking eyes until she finally made her way to the typewriter and he could breathe again.

 

doing fine

bored

you

 

The spider was visibly tired after the effort of typing those four words, but all Tarvek could manage in response was a half-hearted shrug and accompanying grimace. She stared at him in a thoroughly spiderly way that somehow managed to be disapproving and turned back to the typewriter.

 

shower

 

“Ugh, fine,” said Tarvek to disguise the churn of anxiety curdling in his gut. When Gil had first put together the typewriter over a year ago, Anevka had typed at them for hours, delighted to be able to communicate again. Now she stumbled back to her web after only five words, clearly exhausted, and _he still didn’t know how to fix her_. Not for the first time, he whispered a curse on his father to gods he didn’t believe in.

 

*

 

The water was good. Tarvek liked his showers uncomfortably hot, so hot his pale skin turned a startling shade of pink and the tense muscles in his back relaxed and his body could wash away down the plughole. But the water wasn’t hot enough to stop his mind… contemplating. Contemplating the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Gil had been right.

 

Tarvek stayed in the shower until condensation dripped off the ceiling and the heat made him feel a little woozy. When he finally stumbled out of the bathroom steam followed him out the door and down the corridor to his bedroom. Once he’d found his trousers, he emerged into the main lab still dripping wet. There was no sign of Gil, and finally the insistent little part of his brain telling him something was different shouted loud enough to be heard.

 

“Oh,” said Tarvek.

 

He told himself it was good. This way, he could give it one honest, genuine attempt and when it didn’t work he wouldn’t have to tell Gil anything. Really, it was the best way.

 

It couldn’t be done in the main lab. Anevka couldn’t see if it went wrong, and there were places in the bunker Gil had never even been. He’d try it with something inanimate first. Something alive but not an animal… a plant or an egg or something. Something small. Then if that worked, well, it wouldn’t work but if it did, then insects, or maybe even some small- no. Then straight to arachnids. Then straight to Anevka. Not that it would work anyway.

Tarvek’s footsteps echoed dully off the metal floor of the bunker. He found himself walking faster and faster and so fast the echoes overlapped, and for the first time in his life, he allowed himself to truly listen to the sound. To the underlying music of it all. It was like a tide, insistent and alluring and such a tiny part of something so much bigger and all right there in front of him and it tugged at the place behind his breast bone and it. Was. Dangerous.

 

The heavy thud of a door shutting and locking behind him was comfortingly isolating, like a roof under heavy rain. He took a deep breath and pretended that it didn’t catch on the anxiety clustering in the back of his throat. This was his space. He could do anything here. It wasn’t a Secret Laboratory, it was just a lab that was a secret. Where he did secret experiments and asked secret questions and kept secret equipment. It never crossed his mind why he kept it all hidden. Even if it had he would never have realised it was only sneakiness as a sheer force of habit. The closest he might have come would have been a rather sarcastic speculation about a family trait.

 

*

 

Start small. An apple. Smooth and red and speckled with green. There. Sing the song it sings to itself. Feel the warm safe hungry dirt pushing up and into life. Feel the unfurling of branches and leaves and flowers swelling and ripening into fruit. Feel the pregnant promise of seeds nestled in crisp cold flesh. Repeat it over and over and over until you drown its own voice out. Now you tell it what it is.

 

Tarvek gasped. He stared transfixed at the fruit in front of him. Not an apple, not anymore. A pomegranate.

 

He allowed himself one wide grin and two deep breaths before he scrambled to retrieve a spider. It was harder this time, and sweat beaded on his forehead and his glasses slid down his nose, but finally a black scorpion with large pincers scuttled around in the jar in front of him.

 

At this point, nothing could have pulled him away. Tarvek couldn’t tell that his heart was racing, or see the steam filling the lab. His breath was steady as he wiped his glasses on an unstained corner of his labcoat. He didn’t even notice how his legs trembled with exertion as he stumbled to uncover a rusting hospital bed tucked away behind his workbench. It squeaked as he wheeled it up to his desk, where another jar with another spider was waiting. Though he moved quickly, the whole process felt laboriously slow and it was with some impatience that Tarvek tipped the spider onto the hospital bed and began to hum softly.

 

It was difficult to pinpoint his first mistake, certainly it wasn’t one he noticed at the time. His second mistake was ignoring the stuttering in his chest and the weakness in his limbs as he began to sing the spider’s song in earnest. His third was stopping.

 

As soon as he did, the thing that had once been a spider began screaming. It already had a human mouth, and the sound warped it further, twisting and reshaping its body and breaking and breaking it beyond the point where it should have died. The sensible part of Tarvek’s brain woke up. He took a moment to stare and study the… the… ( _oh shit_ ) the Abomination. It had eight eyes in a human skull. Seven were black and predatory, but one was brown and human and looked startling like Gil’s. Its body looked human but was segmented like a spider’s, and the legs… the legs really did not bear thinking about. Tarvek decided that he’d definitely had his fill of looking at the creature and sprinted to his workbench, to the deathray with the frayed wiring he’d left there.

 

He dove under the bench with his death ray and began fiddling with the wires. It would definitely still work, but it might kill him in the process if he didn’t find an insulator. His pockets were frustratingly empty, as was the area under his work bench.

 

 _Gil would never be this tidy,_ he thought with irritation as his eyes drifted upwards to the underside of the bench.

 

Whomever had owned this lab before Tarvek had had the unsavoury habit of sticking their gum on the bottom of the table. He experienced a spilt second of revulsed indecision before he grabbed a wad and stuck in his mouth. He could hear the Abomination ( _oh shit I made an Abomination_ ) thrashing around and still screaming as he chewed. A taste of dust and something like old milk lingered in his mouth even after the gum was stuck securely to the exposed wires and the death ray was fully functional and supposedly safe.

 

As he prepared to leap out at the monster, Tarvek felt a thud above him. Taking a deep breath, he aimed straight upwards and turned his face from the blast. As predicted, the death ray shot straight through the wooden bench top and hit the thing right in the chest. Not as predicted, the creature seemingly absorbed the deadly energy and reached a spider leg with a human hand down through the hole to grab Tarvek’s neck.

 

It squeezed thick hairy fingers around his throat and his felt his vision narrowing. He scratched futilely at its hand with bitten fingernails and kicked desperately at its body.

 

Then the world shattered with one clear ringing note. The roof fell in on them and the Abomination faded into harmless noise.  Tarvek stared up through steam and dust and the remains of the ruined ceiling at a strange figure outlined by sunlight.

 

“Are you my squatter?” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tarvek. Is. So. Hard. To. Write. I hope you like this chapter cause I sure don't. 
> 
> Our boys can't keep out of trouble can they? Would we have them any other way?
> 
> Thing I had to do so much research into it made me uncomfortable and I had a really weird dream about it: spiders, specifically the fact that the number of eyes they have varies from species to species.
> 
> Highlight from my notes for the chapter: Sing a song of arrrrgh spiders.
> 
> Next time: The plot beckons... Elphie gets to write more than two characters in a chapter!


	4. Nobody Sings On Empty

The most beautiful woman in the world was yelling at him. She hadn’t taken a breath for at least a minute and Tarvek couldn’t work out if she was angrier about his accidental Abomination or that he’d apparently been living in her family’s bunker for over a year. She had a mass of strawberry-blonde hair and bottle-green eyes behind big round spectacles and there was tightness in his chest as she shouted at him that almost made him think of someone else.

 

He shifted awkwardly from foot to foot as she continued her tirade. She’d began her verbal assault almost immediately after helping him out from under the remains of the hospital bed and continued the entire time she’d bandaged a cut on his arm that he didn’t remember getting. It wasn’t really her anger that was making him uncomfortable though. It was the steady gaze of the woman behind her. A woman with green hair, strangely familiar eyes and a pair of ridiculously large swords on her back. She held her body like a coiled spring and blinked lazily like a cat that didn’t consider him a threat.

 

She caught him looking at her and grinned dangerously. “Agatha,” she said, “He’s going to pass out.”

 

Tarvek found himself a little offended, even as his knees began to buckle.

 

The woman called Agatha stopped and glared at him. “Don’t you know _anything_?” she snapped, now more exasperated than outright livid. “You have to pace yourself. If you don’t do things properly you’ll get yourself killed. What were you even trying to do anyway? Full body transmutation almost never ends well. The last person I saw try it _melted_. You must have a really strong spark to even survive this.” She stopped and, to his surprise, blushed at the accidental compliment.

 

Her gaze softened when she noticed how very hard he was trying to stay on his feet. “Look, sit down. We need to torch this lab so that thing can’t reform sometime. Do you have any notes you need to save?”

 

Tarvek shook his head numbly. Any notes he’d had with him were already destroyed and the really important ones were still in the main lab.

 

“Alright, Zeetha will take you to have a little nap and then you will explain yourself,” said Agatha, already surveying the destroyed lab with her hands on her hips.

 

He looked at Zeetha, who grinned that dangerous grin again and cocked an eyebrow suggestively. Before he could make a move she’d picked him up and thrown him over her shoulder.

 

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t do something else stupid,” she said to Agatha and then murmured in Tarvek’s ear, “Point the way to your boudoir then.”

 

But he had already passed out.

 

*

 

Tarvek was having a little trouble talking to people who weren’t Gil or his sister trapped in a spider's body. He’d been presented with an awful lot of information in the hour since he’d woken from his involuntary nap (none of which he’d retained), and spoken to more people than he’d even seen since leaving his father’s court. It was all deeply confusing, and he was still disoriented to the point where he hadn’t even given them a fake name.

 

He’d yet to see Agatha again. He really wanted to see Agatha again.

 

Someone he really could have stood to see less of was Zeetha. She hadn’t let him out of her sight. Her loud laugh and slightly mocking expression followed him around the… circus? She seemed to delight in taking him from awkward introduction to mildly terrifying encounter to those both awkward and mildly terrifying. He met a doctor who forcibly looked down his throat, tutted and then had to be dissuaded from giving him a “calming pie”, a woman who claimed to be a countess despite clearly being part of a circus and a refreshingly normalish woman who gave him a bowl of stew and told him not to be so worried, found out who he was, and then told him he was right to be worried.

 

The camp was situated a short distance from the brand new and slightly smoking entrance to the bunker he still considered his. It was too loud and stank of horses, motor oil and smoke from the fires that burned constantly around its perimeter (a necessity in the Wastelands to deter any wandering somethings). Tarvek found an almost comfortable log near a fire in a quiet corner of the camp and stared into the flames. There was something at the edge of his attention that he couldn’t quite catch sight of and every time he tried to focus his head throbbed in protest.

 

Zeetha stood behind him, staring out into the Wastelands and sipping something hot from a mug she hadn’t offered to Tarvek. “Where exactly would I run to?” he asked her.

 

She turned slowly to face him and her disquieting grin seemed to get even wider. “Do you think I’m _guarding_ you?” she said.

 

Before Tarvek could voice a reply, he saw Agatha appear from behind a wagon. She was wiping grease from her hands with the bottom of her skirt and there was more smudged on her forehead and right cheek. Her hair was piled on top of her head and there was spanner stuck in it. She looked stressed.

 

“How’s he doing?” she said as Zeetha wordlessly passed her the mug.

 

“Couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag, would lose a fight to a mimmoth, cuter than the last person you fancied,” said Zeetha.

 

“It’s very nice to see you again, could you please explain what’s going on?” Tarvek tried to say.

 

Agatha looked at Zeetha again. “How long has he been slurring?” she asked.

 

“That’s new.”

 

Agatha bit her lip, crouched down in front of him and took off his glasses. She pulled a battered headtorch from one of her many pockets and shone it into his eyes.

 

“You’re finding it hard to think, aren’t you?” she said softly and then continued without waiting for an answer, “You’ve made yourself ill. Magic can’t be used like you just did, you have to ground it with tech. And you always have to give something back or you get yourself killed. Like you nearly just did. You’ve never done anything like this before have you?”

 

This time she waited and Tarvek shook his head.

 

Agatha stood up rapidly and began pacing in front of the fire. “This. Keeps. Happening. You can’t _be_ a Spark without using magic. How many times have we been here? How many times have we not been there? Orpheus has got to-” she stopped and looked at Tarvek. “I’ll be back,” she said and hurried away.

 

She didn’t take long, and when she returned she was carrying, with both hands, a large flask of lumpy grey liquid. “You’re going to have to drink all of this. Sorry,” she said and sat down heavily next to him on the log. She closed her eyes and began humming quietly.

 

The unknown liquid had the texture of yoghurt and a taste like sweaty shoes. It was weird that he’d just started drinking it without question, really weird. Most of this situation was weird in fact. Even Agatha was pretty strange and Zeetha might have been the strangest person he’d ever met, after Gil. How had he been fine with it all?

 

Agatha’s humming was getting insistent. Tarvek drained the flask but before he could ask her to stop Zeetha was right behind him with her nails digging into his shoulders, hissing in his ear.

 

“You’ll make this a lot easier on her if you join in,” she said.

 

Tarvek stared at Agatha, at the engine grease still smeared on her face and the tiny conducting motions she made with her hands as she hummed. He decided to give her exactly half of his trust.

 

It was quite a solemn tune, fast and unpredictable with the occasional tinkling refrain. It was amazing how quickly he picked it up as he began to hum along. It was oddly comfortable and familiar, like it had been curled up in his throat for his whole life. His very bones seemed to know the next note. He knew exactly where the song would go next, he knew he could take it and use it to tell himself who he was and he knew when it was winding down. At some point Agatha had stopped leading and started humming along with him, and she stuttered a little when it came to the end, but when he opened his eyes she was beaming at him.

 

“You need to know the song you sing before you sing for anything else,” she said.

 

When she stood and wobbled on her feet Zeetha was there to prop her up and chastise her for not sleeping. She was leaning on Zeetha so heavily as they walked away she was practically being carried. Just before they disappeared between two wagons she called, “Yours is very pretty by the way.”

 

Tarvek was left on the log by the fire. He hummed a little to himself and shook his head. He could finally think again and he couldn’t think of what to do. He could just go. He should just leave now. He could go home.

 

He shook his head again. He couldn’t go home. He didn’t actually want to go home. Then, much later than he should have, he thought of Anevka. If Agatha could do that for him, maybe she could do something for her. Maybe.

 

*

 

Tarvek couldn’t find Agatha or even Zeetha. Barely an hour ago he couldn’t shake the green haired woman and now she had shaken him. He’d been a lot more confused and a lot less frustrated an hour ago. He found himself looking back fondly on the time. He may have been dying but it had been a nice break.

 

“Oi,” said an already all-too-familiar voice from atop a wagon, “She wants to talk to you. Be polite.”

 

Tarvek looked up at Zeetha. She was crouched like a protective gargoyle on the roof of a pretty yellow wagon with painted vines and flowers trailing over it. She wasn’t grinning anymore, which was somehow worse, and instead looked as if she was measuring him up and finding herself disappointed. She pulled a short knife from her boot and pointed it at him. “Make good choices,” she said and gestured with the knife for him to enter the wagon.

 

When he pushed open the door he heard Agatha swear mildly and a rustle as she frantically tried to hide her notes and look as if she’d been resting.

 

“Oh! I thought you were Zeetha,” she said when she saw him, and laughed lightly and uneasily.

 

It was obvious to Tarvek that she was in charge, and that she inspired some fierce loyalty. But she was clearly not a tyrant, which worried him. You couldn’t command this many people without being noticed by the Baron for more than a few days, at most. You also couldn’t manufacture this level of trust and respect in only a few days. These people had followed her for a long time, so why hadn’t he heard of her? Why hadn’t her makeshift… whatever it was, already been crushed by the Orpheus Empire?

 

“Tarvek,” said Agatha, and as she said his name something small and joyous and highly excitable unfurled in the pit of his stomach, “Have you ever heard of Hadestown?”

 

“Are you asking if I think it’s real, because honestly I would have said no 30 seconds ago.”

 

Again that light laugh, slightly more comfortable now. “I’m Agatha Hades, Lady of Hadestown, Ruler of the Undergrounds, unofficial protector of magic in Europa.” Amazingly, the titles didn’t sound pompous when she said them, just matter of fact and almost apologetic.

 

“Nice to meet you,” said Tarvek, “I’m-”

 

He was interrupted by a loud banging from above them.

 

“Zeetha wants us to get on with it,” said Agatha, and actually chuckled, then looked at him seriously. “That stunt you pulled. People don’t do things like that unless they’re desperate. Who were you trying to save and why?”

 

“My sister. My father used her to-”

 

“I know about Aaronev,” said Agatha darkly. “Can she still be saved?”

 

“Yes!” said Tarvek, too quickly. “…I think so?”

 

Agatha let out a deep breath that neither of them had realised she’d been holding. She pulled the spanner from her hair and massaged her temples. If he had known her longer, Tarvek would have seen how nervous she was, but all he saw was how tired she looked.

 

“I can help. Hadestown can help,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “But it would have to be _in_ Hadestown.”

 

Tarvek stared. For a long moment he considered not saying anything at all. This was too good. Too lucky. There had to be a catch.

 

Then again, what was the alternative?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the longest chapter so far! What's truly incredible is that there were about a million things I was SUPPOSED to include in this chapter that I just... haven't. 
> 
> I love Zeetha and I love how scared Tarvek is of her. I'm also very angry at myself for putting Agatha under an ungodly amount of stress but unfortunately that's the only way this story works.
> 
> Thing I spent entirely too long worrying about before I decided just fuck it: "Oi".
> 
> Highlight from my notes for the chapter: Zeetha: Hi. Tarvek: *cries*
> 
> Next time: Gil. Gil. Gil. God I've missed Gil. What's he been up to? Isn't he supposed to be a main character? I also get to introduce my faves which I'm dreading.


	5. Now That The Chips Are Down

The people of Zumzum were very grateful. Grateful in a “please leave town as soon as you can walk again before you cause any more trouble madboy” kind of way. Not for the first time, Gil offered to mobilise the town, to even get it airborne. Not for the first time, the villagers politely but firmly refused him.

 

Amazingly, Gil’s flying machine was just outside the village walls. Exactly where he left it, a rarity in the Wastelands. He’d slept through a whole day and night and his entire body still ached. His muscles were sore and tight and they complained every time he moved too quickly, so even getting into the machine and setting it up for flight was a long process. Bizarrely, it was his broken nose that gave him the most trouble. Every time he took a breath it made a thoroughly embarrassing noise somewhere between a whistle and a snort, and by the time he leaned stiffly into the pilot’s seat he was completely out of breath. He took his time catching it again. He was in no hurry to return to his fight with Tarvek.

 

Gil loved flying. Perhaps it was growing up on an airship (it was probably growing up on an airship), but being in the air felt like the safest place for him. The skies of Europa had always been his, and he appreciated their uncomplicated openness more than anything. He whistled up a little wind and coasted on that for a while, listening to the stories of the breeze. Unfortunately, what interests a breeze is not the same as what interests a man, and so Gil heard nothing of what was waiting for him at the bunker. Instead he passed a pleasant afternoon’s flight learning about the aging of leaves, old zephyr-folk tales of flirtations with mountains and something about the smell of sunlight.

 

It didn’t actually overly concern him when he saw smoke above the treetops. The Wastelands were always burning somewhere, it just meant a couple of days stuck underground waiting for it to burn out. Even as he got closer he could come up with hundreds of reasonable and entirely non-stressful explanations. It wasn’t until he circled directly over the bunker like a bird of prey, and saw the still smoking hole punched right into an underground lab that he felt real worry claw at the back of his throat. His guilt began to gnaw at his chest.

 

He landed the flying machine in a mess of wheel ruts and burned out bonfires. About two dozen people had made camp here, right above the bunker. Late noonlight streamed through the trees, dappling the ground with patches of shadow and creating plenty of hidden places for something to hide. Gil steeled himself, though he wasn’t exactly sure he had another fight in him. He headed for the smell of smoke.

 

He scraped his hand nastily whilst climbing down into the now exposed bunker. It had been a while since the fire had burned out, but there were still some glowing embers and enough smoke to make it hard to breathe. He had never even seen this lab before, and he wondered what it looked like before it had been reduced to ash and dust. Stumbling a little as he moved around in the dark, his head and his shoulder and his hand throbbed and complained as he hacked and coughed in the smoke. His shirt was already bloodstained and tattered, so it wasn’t too much of a loss when Gil ripped a strip from the bottom and tied it around his nose and mouth. It was nice to breathe.

 

 

This was a cleansing. Gil could feel it now the smoke wasn’t choking him. The air was too sterile and quiet for it to be anything else. It was a big cleansing too, the kind that would have taken his father, with all the proper protocol and precaution and plenty of time on his hands, at least a day. This was someone in a hurry. Too much of a hurry to set clear boundaries for the cleansing.

 

 _Oh gods_ , he thought, _how far does it reach?_

The door of the lab was slightly melted into its frame, but it was no match for Gil, running high on adrenaline and whatever else the Baron had deemed useful coursing through his veins. He pulled it right out of the wall and flung it behind him as he charged down the hallway. Working mainly on instinct, he headed in the general direction of the main lab.

 

He crashed through his bedroom door and onto his knees in one violent movement. Kneeling in front of his chest of drawers, he pulled open the bottom drawer. If the cloaking spell had held, he would have been looking at assorted socks and underpants, but instead he was greeted with a collection of shattered and crumbling magical objects. The truth-seeing spyglass he’d had since he was eight, his father’s conducting gloves, the lockets containing snippets of the songs of his mother and sister were all desecrated and useless. Gil closed the drawer slowly. Who had the power to do this? Not Tarvek. Although by this point Gil was certain something very unpleasant had happened to him. Tarvek didn’t know his own song, let alone a singing of this magnitude and reach. It was a huge working. Every single thing with a shred of magic, anywhere in the vicinity, had been destroyed. Something cold settled over Gil.

 

 _Late!_ taunted his guilt.

 

“Zoing!” he yelled. “Zoing?”

 

Listening carefully, he caught a soft keening coming from- Where? …the cupboard he and Tarvek had had their fight in! When he opened the door, a small body fell against him. The construct was barely held together. The music Gil had placed at his core was rapidly fading into dissonance. Zoing babbled wordlessly as Gil tried frantically to wrap him in notes of strength and stability, but even they were too much for the little construct to contain. His body shuddered, once, twice, in Gil’s arms.

 

The guilt was crowing victoriously above him. _TOO LATE TOO LATE TOO LATE_ it chanted until it was the only thing Gil could hear and he was curled up on the floor with his arms wrapped around his head and his face wet, trying to block out the sound.

 

He didn’t know how long he stayed like that.

 

He didn’t really register carrying Zoing up out of the bunker and into the dying sunlight. Or digging a grave that was bigger and deeper than necessary. He didn’t really notice finding a log by a dead campfire and sitting with his back to the new grave. He stared at where the flames would be.

 

He stayed there until something familiar plucked at his attention. An echo of a working made after the cleansing. A sombre, silly song that he’d heard almost every day for more than a year. An echo that lead away and… under?

 

Gil came back to himself a little then. And he came back to rage. Cold, comforting, insulating rage. A focusing rage. A one thought, don’t-have-to-think-about-anything-else, rage.

 

_He doesn’t get to leave me._

One thought, clear as lightning and stronger that grief, louder than his guilt.

 

_HE DOESN’T GET TO LEAVE ME._

*

 

Gil packed quickly and badly. The walls of the bunker were suddenly far too close and the space was far too empty. He hadn’t wanted to believe Tarvek had left on purpose, but when he saw the ghastly, glaring absence of Anevka’s terrarium, there was no more denying to be done.

 

When Gil left the bunker, he didn’t look back.

 

He left his flying machine behind. The faint echo of Tarvek’s song was sinking deeper and deeper below the ground, and there was no way he could follow it from the air.

 

On the first night, Gil realised he hadn’t brought a tent. He lay on a waterproof groundsheet he had remembered to bring and didn’t sleep. He walked right through the second night, and the third. The fourth day was the hardest though. He was attacked by a miniature automaton orchestra, which would have been cute if they hadn’t been so numerous and bloody minded. The brass and woodwind instruments made for quite interesting bruises.

 

He made camp that night without much hope for sleep, but sleep came for him anyway. Almost. Just as he was about to doze off against a tree, he was jolted into consciousness by loud, unfamiliar, voices.

 

“No vay, hennyone out here vould hef to be a total eediot,” said one.

 

Gil shot to his feet and fumbled for his penknife.

 

“Ho look, it'z an eediot,” said another, right behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... um... I didn't know I was going to kill Zoing when I started writing this chapter? Sorry.
> 
> THE BOYZ ARE HERE! I LUF THE BOYZ! Even if I have to try and write Jägerspeak. 
> 
> Thing I spent ages on and then cut from the chapter because of reasons: Complete lists of everything Gil did and didn't but should have brought with him. 
> 
> Highlight from my notes for the chapter: Myyyyyyy Gilshake brings all the boyz to the yard and they're like "Ho, iz an eediot."


	6. Don't Give Your Name, You Don't Have One

Tarvek liked Agatha’s train. It was the most luxurious form of transport he’d ever experienced. Its soft carpets and softer beds reminded him of home, or rather, the bits he liked to be reminded about home. Anevka seemed to be enjoying herself too, and she was a lot less _spidery_ when surrounded by people. She didn’t mention how much she was missing Gil. It was brave of her not to, but Tarvek could tell. He didn’t miss Gil at all and his absence still felt uncomfortable. So obviously Anevka was missing Gil more than she could say.

 

Agatha’s train didn’t like Tarvek. Scornful whispers followed him from carriage to carriage, and Agatha would often chastise the very belligerent engine out loud as it murmured its displeasure in her ear.

 

“It can be a little protective,” she said to Tarvek, by way of apology and explanation. Tarvek wasn’t sure it sufficed for either.

 

Ever since they’d entered the Underground, the windows of the train had been black as pitch. But at around the time Tarvek had begun to sense an air of anticipation in the people who knew where they were going, there had been strange glimpses of somethings out there in the dark. At first he had assumed it was the train, which was definitely somehow sentient, playing with his perception. Then he had caught Zeetha warily staring beyond her reflection, counting the frequency of the flashes.

 

“You should sit down,” she said when Tarvek asked her what she was doing.

 

“We’re almost there,” she said when he asked her why she was doing it.

 

Zeetha left the carriage. Tarvek squinted out the window. More and more often now, once every few minutes, now every few seconds, there were bursts of colour breaking the darkness. The colours were noisy, begging him to sing with them, and they made shapes like clockwork and white water rapids and confused looking animals and a hand reaching out and-

 

“Tarvek!” He hadn’t heard Agatha enter. “Close your eyes _now_ , don’t listen, and don’t make a sound.”

 

Agatha’s hands were soft, but callused at the fingertips, as she pried his hands away from his ears sometime later. At some point in all the ensuing chaos, the train had come to a halt and everything was echoingly quiet.

 

“Sorry about that,” she said, “First time through the bone door is always a little rough. You did well though.”

 

“What were they?” said Tarvek, whilst taking a quick mental stock of all his faculties, which were mercifully all still in order.

 

“Dreams,” said Agatha, and beamed at him like sunlight, “What a defence, right? Can’t see Klaus getting through _that_ anytime soon.” Her last words were spoken with pure smug glee, and she crossed her arms in something like defiance.

 

He stared at her, struck quite speechless by the brightness of her smile. She stared back at him, her triumphant grin softening slightly.

 

When she turned away, the tops of her ears were flushed bright pink and her words came out slightly too quickly. “Anyway, um, this way,” she said and pulled him off of the train. She regained some composure as they stepped onto the platform and she spread out her arms as if gifting him her city.

 

 “Welcome to Hadestown, Tarvek Eurydice.”

 

Tarvek was speechless for an entirely different reason.

 

*

 

“Gil. Gil… um, Wulfenbach?”

 

“Iz nize to meet hyu, Gil Vulfenbach,” said the purple one.

 

For the first time in many days, Gil remembered what effect sleep deprivation actually had on a person. He _knew_ what they were. He knew he knew.

 

“Well Gil Vulfenbach, iz hyu tryink to gets hyuself keeled?” said the green one, grinning widely and showing off a distressing array of very large, very pointy teeth.

 

“Dimo, ve musht introduce ourselves properly. Hy em Maxim, diz iz-”

 

“Oggie!” said the one with a single horn curling up behind his left ear, and gave him a friendly little wave.

 

Dimo didn’t say anything. His wary glare didn’t seem to be directed at anyone or anything in particular, but Gil was definitely getting the brunt of it.

 

“Uuuuuuund..?” said Maxim.

 

“Dimo.”

 

“Dere! Lufley! Now, vho iz tryink to gets keeled? Can ve help?”

 

 _Oh shit,_ thought Gil, _Jägers._

 

*

 

Gil wasn’t entirely sure how he’d managed to acquire travelling companions. It had happened pretty quickly. He was fairly certain they were just waiting to see how long it took him to die. He had a suspicion they’d bet on it. Despite their apparent fascination with his impending doom, Gil appreciated their company. They had been almost… _maternal_ in ensuring he slept at least semi-regularly. Almost, because that sometimes meant Oggie hitting him over the head with a rock.

 

They hadn’t told him what they were doing in the Wastelands. He hadn’t told them what he was doing in the Wastelands. For now, that seemed to work. Gil knew it wouldn’t for long.

 

They had left the forest several days ago, and were now heading across a boggy plain. The swampy ground stank and sucked at their feet, and every morning Gil scraped off a layer of mud and by every noontime he was covered again. Occasionally, they would pass pools of dark, stagnant water with strange lights flickering under the surface. Gil would pretend he didn’t notice as the Jägers bunched around him protectively.

 

For a while, Gil had been picking up the echo of another song, pealing out alongside Tarvek’s. They went well together, the other song was lighter and more confident in itself, joyful but tempered. Sweeter. It made Tarvek’s song glow in the soundscape. It made Gil’s blood boil. It made Gil’s blood boil so much he didn’t notice the missing notes, the third part of the harmony, the uneven, unfinished beat.

 

At the end of the marshlands, a peculiar mountain rose above them. The closer they got, the more worried the Jägers seemed to get. By now, it was obvious that they were tracking something, much in the same way he was, a sound something like a set of drums falling down stairs that the Jägers were following. He concentrated on its discord as a welcome antidote to Tarvek and the new song, and as he filled his mind with music, he slipped and stumbled into one of those strange, still pools.

 

Maxim and Oggie grabbing his arms and pulling him backwards. Dimo leaping over him and onto the chest of the monster rising out of the water. A monster like a woman, or a pack of dogs, or both. A monster with no skin, just bleeding muscle and exposed veins and sharp, stabbing bones.

 

Dimo grabbed the monster by its ears and headbutted it right in the forehead. It howled in confusion and clamped its teeth down on his arm. Maxim and Oggie were caught unawares when Gil pulled out of their grasp and drew a knife from his belt. He’d sung the blade into sharpness himself, and chords glistened like oil on its surface. He launched himself at the beast, and drove the knife into a vulnerable place behind one of its ears. It shrieked and Dimo dropped out of its mouth. He hit the mud and rolled. Whining like a wounded dog, the monster sank down into the pool, leaving a sheen of red on the surface of the water.

 

“Dot vas great! Ve keecked monshter ass!” yelled Dimo, despite his mangled arm.

 

“Dot vas schmotguy schtuff!” said Oggie, punching Gil in the arm and making his healing ribs twinge in pain.

 

“Yah hyu made it go avay vitout hittink it for dayz. Dot vas schmot!” said Maxim.

 

“Was that what you were hunting?” asked Gil.

 

“Ho no, dot vun's moch nashtier.”

 

“Oggie,” said Dimo, “Remember ven Miz Agatha said dere are time ven hyu should keep you mouth shot? Dot vas vun uf those times.”

 

“Who’s Agatha?” Gil still had a tight grip on his knife, but he wasn’t quite pointing it at the Jägers.

 

“Vill hyu tell uz you real name? _Vulfenbach_?” Dimo said, shooting Gil that wary glare he thought he’d managed to dispel.

 

Gil felt the tension within him snap. He hung his head. “I can’t,” he mumbled.

 

Maxim patted him on the head, “Yah, und ve can’t tell hyu. Iz hokay, ve schtill friends.”

 

*

 

They headed up the mountain. It was odd, and not just in the way it stood alone. It seemed slightly artificial, as if it had been built according to what a mountain should look like, as opposed to what a mountain actually looks like. Sometimes, Gil could almost discern a domed shape, under the shale and rocky outcrops. Under the slightly dubious pointy bits.

 

“Dis iz embarrassink, ve iz almosht home,” said Maxim, right before something huge and furry leapt at them.

 

It was a dog. A towering terrifying three-headed dog, granted, but a dog nonetheless.

 

“ _This_ is the big secret?" said Gil from behind a boulder.

 

 “No, diz iz a leedle secret, inside de big secret,” said Oggie, from behind a different boulder.

 

“Oggie!” came from behind yet another rock.

 

“Vaz dat anodder vun uf doze time?” asked Oggie solemnly.

 

Overlapping cries of “No, iz behind hyu!” and “Vell yah but-” came from behind the other rock as Oggie turned to be greeted by a massive full-body lick from one of the dog’s heads.

 

“Hey!” shouted Gil, and ran at the creature.

 

The dog crouched down on its front paws and stuck its wagging tail high in the air. Gil just caught a glimpse of its collar and shiny name tag before one of its massive paws batted him down. He could feel its claws sinking deep into his stomach as the dog cocked all three of his heads to one side and blinked at him inquisitively. Now that Gil was up close, he could see the scars lining its body, and the stitches keeping it together. It was a construct, just like Zoing.

 

“Hyu know, for a schmotguy, dot vas pretty schtupid,” said one of the Jägers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Errrrrrk. This chapter is what it is I guess. 
> 
> We're halfway though! Well, pretty much anyway.
> 
> There's something about writing Da Boyz which is kinda like writing the Nac Mac Feegle. On reflection they're pretty similar.
> 
> Thing I am eternally indebted to for this chapter and even with I was close to tearing my hair out and my God it was still a lot of work to get it right cause even if it was a massive help it's not perfect: these two Jägerspeak translators  
> http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/comics/girlgenius/jagertrans.shtml  
> http://santiago.mapache.org/toys/jager/jagerize.cgi
> 
> Highlight from my notes for the chapter: Ve hunt! (And ve don't mention ve are only hunting for a lost puppy.)
> 
> Next time: FINALLY we're way down Hadestown.


End file.
